Anxiety
Does Social Anxiety Make Us Over-Interpret What Others Think?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People with social anxiety only over-interpret others' thoughts and intentions during stressful, self-referential social interactions, rather than as a general, constant habit.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Social cognitive and mentalizing difficulties manifest differently across psychiatric profiles, with schizophrenia and high schizotypy generally leading to undermentalizing or severe overall deficits, whereas borderline personality disorder and social anxiety lead to 'hypermentalizing' patterns.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Psychology students selected for social-anxiety range; live interview vs film-character mentalizing
- N
- N=113 · Phase 2; 97 women; mean age 21.1
- Population
- Undergraduate psychology students varying in social anxiety
- Outcome
- Over-interpretation of others' mental states in a live interview but not for movie characters
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
Does Social Anxiety Make Us Over-Interpret What Others Think?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
113 college students
Participants included 113 individuals (97 females, or 85.8%; 85% White-European, 14% Latino, 1% Arabic) with a mean age of 21.1 years old (SD = 2.7), who participated in the Phase 2 of a study about MZ and SA.
What is Hypermentalizing (HMZ)?
HMZ refers to the over-attribution of mental states to others (such as the intention of negative evaluation), that goes far beyond the relevant context.
Key findings
Socially anxious participants over-interpreted the interviewer's thoughts during the live interview, but did not show this bias when evaluating movie characters. Surprisingly, this tendency to over-interpret others during direct interaction was not influenced by the participants' self-esteem or negative self-schemas.
Methodology
Researchers recruited 113 college students, categorizing them into high or low social anxiety groups based on screening tests. Participants completed a movie-watching task and a live, personal interview to measure how much they over-attributed thoughts to others. The researchers also measured the participants' self-esteem to see if negative self-views explained over-interpreting behavior.
Limitations
This study cannot prove that social anxiety directly causes context-dependent over-interpretation, as the design is correlational. Additionally, the sample consisted of 85.8% female university students, meaning these patterns might not apply to men or the broader public. Finally, because the study relied on self-reports for self-image, it cannot rule out whether unconscious or implicit self-esteem plays a role.
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.
- Do socially anxious people see neutral faces as threatening?
- How do anxiety and fear alter our perception of time?
- Do socially anxious people look at, then away from, a feared person?
- How do worry and good moments shape anxiety in people with GAD?
- Do worry and metacognition drive anxiety during therapy?